Down to Business

In Vienna, I rendezvous with Jennifer
Glasse, the fiery reporter from Public Radio International’s The
World. She had recently come to pitch a story to The Pitch Room,
a show I’ve been developing with HBO, partly inspired by my experiences
reporting for FRONTLINE/World.

Jennifer is a seasoned war correspondent,
having spent much of the last decade in places such as Iraq, Chechnya
and Somalia and earlier in her career in Bosnia. Over coffee (she would
say tea, as she isn’t a coffee addict like me) in San Francisco, we
discovered that we had both been thinking about the same documentary --
a story on the hunt for Karadzic and Mladic. Jennifer has great military
connections, and she managed to convince the European Union Force (EUFOR),
the 7,000-strong multinational force that keeps Bosnia from erupting
back into conflict and is supposed to be looking for Karadzic and Mladic,
to let us tag along on its mission.

In the waiting room in Vienna, I feel
as if we have already entered the bubble that is Bosnia. Huddled in
an overcrowded waiting area, we travelers have taken our last breath
of E.U. air, and are taking our leave of a place where borders and currencies
have melted. We pass through security and have our passports stamped.
We are heading to Bosnia, a once-multiethnic state where 200,000 people
had recently died in a fight over redefining borders.

“Bosnia: The Men Who
Got Away” is Joe Rubin’s third broadcast story for
FRONTLINE/World.He has produced and reported for
ABC’s Nightline, including his 2000 documentary on an emerging
resistance movement against Slobodan Milosevic, which got him hooked
on the Balkans. He also produced the Rough Cut “Dark Shadows,” which
covers the rise of nationalism in Serbia. An unbridled enthusiast for
the possibilities of video journalism, Rubin spent time in Latin America
as a Knight Fellow, where he taught digital journalism in Panama, El
Salvador and Ecuador. Recently, Rubin’s been working on the Pitch Room, a program in development
with HBO. He lives in San Francisco.